It’s bad enough I can’t write back to everyone who writes me, but I feel really weird throwing out nice letters after I read them, so sometimes I’ll open my diary and paste little bits from each piece of mail I read as I go.
A letter from Dr. Sacks
Here is one of my prized possessions: a letter from the late, great writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks. He sent it to me in 2014, after seeing my drawing of his book, Musicophilia:
I was thinking this weekend about how much he would’ve liked the documentary My Octopus Teacher. (Note his letterhead above. He loved cephalopods and considered them kindred spirits — they’re smart and they surround themselves with ink! “They called me Inky as a boy,” he wrote in his memoir, On The Move, “and I still seem to get as ink stained as I did seventy years ago.”)
I also rewatched this wonderful video of him showing off his writing desk:
I want company, even if it’s inorganic…I think some of the happiest years of my life were between 10 and 14 when I had a passion for chemistry in general, and metals, in particular. And now, I’ve left my hometown, and my parents are dead, and my brothers are dead, and so much of the past is gone…this rather childlike, chemical bench-like desk appeals to me, gives me some comfort, and makes me feel at home.
I count myself extremely fortunate to possess a letter in his hand. His obituary noted that he received over 10,000 letters a year. He called it an “intercourse with the world,” and said, “I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison.” I fit none of those criteria, and I still had the honor.
To my shame, I never wrote back. I had just moved studios and I couldn’t find the drawing and I didn’t want to write back to him until I found it. By the time I did find the drawing I read that he had terminal cancer and I didn’t want to bother him. Just one of my regrets…
Now all I can do is celebrate him by sharing his work and writing back as much as I can. (I look forward to the forthcoming documentary.)
Filed under: Oliver Sacks
Answering letters
There is no money in answering letters.
—Groucho Marx
I try my best to answer correspondence, but when it comes to email, I feel very much like Donald Knuth:
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.
I’m not interested in being anyone’s boss, so I don’t have an assistant. Everything you see online from me — the newsletter, the blog, etc. — it’s just me. This means I have to make cuts somewhere, and that often means not answering all my email.
Here’s how Neil Gaiman puts it in Make Good Art:
“There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.”
(My friend Hugh MacLeod put it even more succinctly.)
On the weekends, I get fewer emails, so I try to take an hour or so and get through my paper mail. I usually enjoy answering paper mail more than I enjoy answering email. It’s an excuse to buy lots of stamps and use my typewriter. But it’s even more time-consuming than email, and sometimes I get to it all, sometimes I don’t.
I think the connectivity and access we’ve gained to artists in the digital age has skewed our perspective of what counts as generosity and what doesn’t. Sharing work in itself is an act of generosity. Anything on top of that — teaching, correspondence, etc. — is just another layer.
A commenter on Instagram yesterday noted how disappointing it feels when you take time to write to an artist and the artist has their assistant respond or doesn’t write back at all.
I encourage you to think of it this way:
Do you want the artists you love answering emails or do you want them making the work you love?
Because it’s hard to do both.
(I know which one I prefer.)
The artist who changed my life
When I was 13, I wrote to the artist Winston Smith, and he wrote me back a 14-page handwritten letter that changed my life:
15 years later, I got to meet him.
I told the whole story two days after it happened when I spoke at Pixar, and then I retold it a few months ago at UX Week and they got it on video. It’s probably my favorite talk I’ve ever given. Enjoy:
Can’t see it on mobile? Watch it here→
SAVING UP FOR WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER
Making art is a lonely business. Hell, being alive is a lonely business.
I have been swimming in tweets and nice e-mails from people discovering my work via the 20×200 prints. It’s pretty wonderful. And disorienting. And a major high.
But it will taper off. And next week I will have a dark day when I want to quit, when I wonder why the heck I even bother with this stuff.
That’s why I attach a Gmail label to every nice e-mail I get. (Trollish e-mails get deleted.) When those dark days roll around and I need a boost, I just click on that label and read through a couple.
Then I get back to work.
Try it: instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. For when you need the lift.
